Finally, we are in a presidential election year.  A little more than a year from now a new person will be sworn in as President of the United States. Seldom has the future of the Republic depended on who that person is.  The next president will keep, expand upon, or abolish the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare.  He or she will likely appoint two or three Supreme Court Justices. The world will be looking to that person to us in the war on terror. The next president can get our debt under control, or allow it to skyrocket.  In short, it really, really matters who our next president is.

Without a veto-proof majority, things like repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, ending federal funding for Planned Parenthood just cannot happen.  Ambitious overhauls of our tax system being currently proposed by several GOP candidates such as a flat or FAIR tax can never happen.  Under a Democratic president the IRS has been weaponized for use against conservatives.  Abolishing the IRS is unlikely to happen even under a Republican president, but certainly won’t happen under a Democrat.

There is every chance that the next president will have to appoint several new Supreme Court justices. The left-right balance of the court sits on a Razor’s edge.  Even justices that have been appointed by Republican presidents have proven unpredictable as to how close, if at all, they will follow the Constitution.  Justices appointed by Democratic presidents on the other hand don’t seem to see the Constitution as a hindrance to furthering the progressive agenda.  Supreme Court and other federal judges continue to have an impact long after the president that appointed them has left office.

Our current president refuses even to identify Islamic extremism as the principal source of terror violence in the world.  Christians are being driven from the Middle East as if we were helpless to stop it.  Attacks will continue here and abroad, probably regardless who his in office.  What we do about it, and how close to home they come may be a factor of how aggressively we pursue them, and how soon we deny them a land base to operate from.  Our next Commander in Chief will have to be willing to keep all options on the table, including ground troops. What’s more, the enemy has to believe it.

We are currently on a trajectory for a Greek-style debt crisis.  That’s not hyperbole or alarmism, it’s simple mathematics. The same baby boomers whose spending created the economic boom in the 90’s adding to our country’s coffers, will be retiring and drawing from them.  No Democrat is even making a pretense of bringing down our debt as a campaign promise.  Our debt will exceed 20 trillion dollars, maybe by a lot more depending who is in office.

These are a lot of very important issues.  At stake is no less than what sort of country the United States will be in the 21^st century.  Will remain a constitutional republic or will any law that can be rationalized as being “for the greater good” be allowed to go unchallenged? Will the genocide of Christians in the Middle East be allowed to continue, or will the next Commander in Chief be as risk adverse as our present one?  How far will our debt be allowed to soar?  Will our next president allow for hyperinflation to pay it off?  What then is the single issue the conservative American voter should consider?  The answer is simple:   Can that person defeat Hillary or whoever winds up becoming the Democratic nominee?

This is not the year to sit on the sidelines if your perfect candidate does not get the nomination.  This is the year when you might remember that perfect is the enemy of good enough. All the GOP candidates say they will be tough on terrorists.  Most want to overhaul the IRS, none want to raise taxes.  Hopefully, each will have the wisdom to appoint justices that will support the Constitution.  Given that the GOP candidates all have similar ambitions, the real ultimate decider might have to be the candidate’s standing in the polls, not the ones that attempt to predict the nominee, but the ones that measure how well he or she would match up against the Democratic nominee.  If they can’t win in the general election it does not matter how well they align with to one’s pet causes.  America needs to reverse course on a number of important fronts in order to retain her identity as the free-market constitutional republic that has existed for the past two hundred thirty odd years.   Choose well.